Making Boiled Linen Rags
I had a deep dislike for microfiber rags, there’s just something about the way they feel on my hands. They leave a fine lint on everything and it drive me CRAZY. Somehow I ended up with a large quantity of these rags, I think Mr Chiots bought them for cleaning the car and somehow they migrated into the house. I finally got sick of them and the lint they produce and decided to make a few boiled linen rags for cleaning.
They’re really quite simple to make, I’m not sure why I haven’t made them before. This linen was purchased on sale a few months ago for only a few dollars a yard. I cut two squares, hemmed them, and boiled them for 15 minutes with a little vinegar in the water.
Then I dried them and used them on the windows – WOW – perfectly clean and not a scrap of lint to be seen. I’ll definitely be making more of these and moving all my microfibers out into the garage for Mr Chiots to use out there.
Do you have any great tips for lint free cleaning?
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Friday Favorites: Mice Cubes
You’d think with all the cats around there wouldn’t be mice in the house, but they manage to get in and keep away from the cats. The cats know they’re there and stalk them, but the mice seem to know a few routes in places where cat claws cannot reach them, mostly in the walls. For the most part I don’t see mice, we hear them every now and again. Last week I closed the door to the pantry and a mouse decided to take advantage. As a result I put out the mice cubes , which I should have done a long time ago.
These things are great, they work very well and you don’t have to worry about finding smashed mice in a trap. My mom started using these many years ago and has always caught any mouse that made it into her house. They’re also nice because they aren’t the spring loaded types, which I don’t really want to have around with the cats.
I now have four of these things baited with peanut butter spread throughout the house in spots that the cats can’t reach. Hopefully they will keep any future mice from feasting on any items in our pantry. Of course the pantry door will stay open now so the cats can patrol that area as well.
Do you ever get mice in the house?
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Friday Favorite: The Lemon Rug
Yesterday I hauled my wool lemon rug out of storage and gave it a thorough cleaning to freshen it up. This rug has been with use for a very long time, probably for 15 years. It has been in our living room and our dining room, most recently it has spent many years in storage. Now that I finally got the office painted, I decided it would be the perfect way to brighten up that space.
There isn’t any flooring in this house, it’s mostly painted subfloor. The paint is chipping and the top layers of the plywood is starting to peel up, which makes for an ugly floor and a tough time cleaning. I’m painting the floor in the office black just like I did in our bedroom.
This will seal up the floors once more and make them a little easier to clean. I think the lemon rug will also look nice with a black border.
It’s not beautiful hardwood flooring, but it will do until that time comes and it’s certainly much better than what is in there now. I’m a big rug person, I love a beautiful wool rug underfoot.
Are you a rug person, or do you prefer plain floors?
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A Bit of a Facelift
While Mr Chiots was in Israel for work last week, I decided it was a good time to paint the office. We’ve been needing to pull everything out to reorganize anyways, this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I painted the ceiling and the walls, along with all the trim. The floor will get a coat of paint as well here in the near future. Yesterday I started the LONG task of cleaning the windows. Which means taking off all the storm windows and screens and cleaning the insides and outsides of each piece. It takes FOREVER to do each one, probably an hour and a half or more for each window.
It involves using my razor scraper to get all the polyurethane off the glass. It means getting out the Bon Ami to scrub the years of caked on dirt from the windows. Unfortunately I forgot to take before photos, so you can’t see the amazing results. When I took these photos I still needed to do one or more cleanings to get the last residual soap off (as you can see by a few streaks).
Clean windows are something I’m always working towards. The wonderful thing is that now that I have them clean it will only take a few minutes every few months to keep them clean! I always love starting the winter season with super clean windows, I don’t want anything reducing the already lesser amount of sunlight.
Are you a clean window person or do you not mind a little life on your windows?
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The Curse Rears Up Again
It’s been a LONG time since we’ve done a major home improvement project, for a few different reasons. One, we simply don’t have much time. Two, we’re undecided as to what exactly is going to happen here. Three, did I mention we just don’t have much time? Four, there is what we call the “Morris Curse” in that projects always take five times as long as you think and cost ten times as much. That being said we’ve been wanting to get our oven hood vented to the outside for a long time. Venting the hood outside is extremely important for indoor air quality. Cooking produces fumes that are not good to breathe, so if you’re cooking, have that vent going! Don’t worry about losing heat, worry about getting pneumonia, stroke, ischaemic heart disease, COPD and lung cancer if you don’t vent it outside. I’d say it’s well worth losing a few pennies of heat to not be breathing cooking fumes. This is especially important if you use a gas range which causes pollution from the flames. Any kind of cooking produce acrolein fumes that you shouldn’t breathe as well as fine particle pollution, so if you have an electric range don’t think you’re off the hook, you still should vent your range hood outside to keep your indoor cleaner.
There has been big discussions around here revolving around remodeling the house or building a new one. Every small project we tackle has us leaning toward the second option. While installing our new powerful range hood we came across several issues, first one being the very spot we wanted to instal it had four studs stacking to form a support beam – GREAT. So we decided looks weren’t as important as fresh air so venting it with two elbows off to the right side would work. Oh well look at that, another group of studs. So we decided to vent it to the left.
What did we discover with this option? Oh yeah a gas line. You can imagine our thoughts when we saw this. After a little searching we discovered it was and old line that was disconnected – whew.
While tackling this project we also found a HUGE nest of insects underneath one cabinet, not sure what exactly happened here – but they are those bone beetles and I found some dog kibble there. Being that we don’t feed dog kibble, I’m guessing perhaps the previous owners kept their kibble in this cabinet? We also found that part of the wood paneling had been eaten by some sort of insect – great. There also seems to have been a time when water got in this corner of the house, not sure if it happened a long time ago and was fixed, or perhaps it’s just lots of mouse urine judging by the rather larger number of old mouse nests we also found – DOUBLE YUCK!
With all of our setbacks we’re still working on getting this crazy thing installed at 8:30pm on Sunday night (so much for a quick project). We ended up having to use two elbows to get the vent in, so now we can’t cover the vent pipe. It’s a good thing I don’t mind the industrial look, and pollution free air will make up for the less than perfect look! I also now have four outlets in the kitchen, super awesome. Before the stove actually had to be plugged in above the countertop (crazy I know) and two outlets didn’t work, so I had to unplug the stove or my over the sink light if I wanted to run the blender or mixer. I’m debating whether or not I want to take the time to paint the kitchen, it’s pretty sad as far as a paint job goes. As you can kind of see in this image, the area above the stove hood wasn’t painted previously, so there’s a square of rather grease stained drywall paper. You can also see the outlines of where the upper cabinets and other things that were hung on the walls – decisions, decisions.
As we do projects like this we keep adding things to the list of reasons it’s probably not a good idea to sink more money into this current house. There are those times when remodeling can be more costly than building new, we’re still looking at things around here, but we may have reached the tipping point. At least we’ll be breathing clean air while our discussions continue!
Have you tackled any home improvement projects lately? Any setbacks?
